Page 34 of Horn of Winter

Anything you can tell me, really.

They are the tears of the goddess Geitha,it replied,who is beholden to destiny, happiness, and ruling.

Those last two don’t often go together, I commented.

Indeed, which is why the goddess often cries.

I suspected it was said in amusement, although there was no hint of it in the guardian’s voice.Why are the tears important to Myrkálfar accession to the throne?

The goddess gifted her tears to the Myrkálfar eons ago. More than that, I cannot say.

There’s no book on it in this library?

If those who attained her gift could not be bothered to record its meaning, why should such records be kept here?

I frowned.You keep plenty of records about artifacts humanity and fae have forgotten.

True, but Geitha was not the most verbose of goddesses and never acquiesced to giving this library information.

I blinked. That almost sounded like a criticism.Did that often happen? Gods not giving information, I mean.

No. It behooves those who play in humanity’s timeline to keep the information options open.

Meaning I’m not the only one with the means of accessing this library?

You are not, but you are the only one who has done so for eons.

I guess it wasn’t too surprising that there’d be others with access, given it made absolutely no sense to have a resource like this tied to one person or bloodline.

What about Borrhás’s Horn?

The librarian didn’t answer, but the books around me spun with dizzying speed for a couple of seconds before one popped out of rotation and floated toward me, hovering in the air while the pages flipped open.

As before, there were no words, only images. I suspected my godly librarian feared I wouldn’t understand anything written—and rightly so, given I couldn’t even read Latin, let alone a language as old as the gods themselves.

The images showed an old man in white with a fierce-looking mop of white hair holding what looked to be a fancy drinking horn to his lips. Ice spun out from the opposite end, coating the nearby trees and people. The page flipped over; the trees and the people were nothing more than blocks of ice.

I glanced up.Borrhás controls the cold north wind and is supposedly the bringer of winter—is his destruction via ice his only vice?

He has other gifts, but the horn is the caller of winds that destroy and ice that coats and fractures.

And can anyone use it? Or does one have to possess magic?

It was designed as a lover’s gift to a queen who wished to bring winter down on all her enemies. When she achieved her goal, she forsook Borrhás, to her endless regret.

Really? What happened?

The book flipped several more pages then stopped, revealing images of a castle wrapped in ice, and a woman asleep in a bed of ice. Only she wasn’t asleep. She was frozen. The final image was of the horn cleaved in two.

When did her kingdom fall?

It didn’t. It remains, forever locked under ice that will never melt until the earth itself no longer exists.

Under one of the ice caps, then, perhaps?

Did Borrhás only have the one horn?The one I’d been shown earlier didn’t really match what I’d heard, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the same one.

The gods rarely duplicate their artifacts.

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