The Church of the Angelus teaches that the lights appeared to the north of Raetia and Kimmeria when the Saints first came through the Gate of Horn.  It was a sign of a sacred promise, that they would protect us from the daemons.


    Of course, Etalan sources make it clear the northern lights existed long before the Great Cataclysm.


    <ul>


    <li style="font-weight: 400">Fran?ois du Lutetia, A History of Narvonne</li>


    </ul>


    ?


    4th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297


    Clarisant dozed as the sleigh travelled north through the pass, and then into the vast land beyond the mountains.  It had been a long night, and she found herself exhausted more easily than before she became pregnant.  When she finally woke, it was a struggle to emerge from the piled furs and expose her face to the wind again.


    “The lights in the sky,” Claire remembered, looking up.  The white-ring where a sun should be hung behind them, to the south, while ahead a shimmering curtain of green, blue and purple stretched across the stars.


    “Nordlicht,” the sleigh driver said, and then continued on with a string of words in Raetian that Claire found incomprehensible.  Instead of trying to understand, she turned to Yaél, who had also fallen asleep at her side, and gave the young squire a nudge.


    Yaél grunted and turned over, pulling some of the furs tight around herself in a sort of cocoon.


    “You’re going to want to see this,” Claire said.


    “Are we there, then?’  Yaél asked, opening one eye.  It must have been enough for her to catch sight of the colors in the sky overhead, for she sat up immediately, grinning.  “It’s beautiful!”


    “It is,” Claire agreed, with a smile.  It was too bad that Trist couldn’t be there to see it with them.


    “What happens next?” Dame Etoile asked, from her other side.


    “The Horned Hunter said that we were to go north, until we saw the lights in the sky,” Claire talked herself through it.  “And then, to call out the name of the Queen of Winter.”


    “Are you going to do it now?”  Yaél asked, hauling herself upright and leaning over the edge of the sleigh to watch the tracks they were leaving behind to mark their passage.


    “Those are the lights,” Claire said, by way of an answer.  “Is everyone prepared?”


    “For more faerie nonsense?”  Henry asked, shaking his head.  “No.  But I won’t get any more prepared if you give me an hour, or a moon.”


    “I don’t see anything ahead but an endless white plane,” John Granger said.  “And I’ve been watching since there was light enough to see.  For all I know, we could go on forever, to the end of the world, and never find anything.  Aye, call her name, m’lady.”


    Claire took a deep breath of the cold air, and looked up to the sky.  Then, as loudly as she could, she called out: “Beira!  Queen of the Northern Lights, I call you!”


    The sleigh driver turned around, his bushy eyebrows coated in frost, eyes wide, and began to harangue her as he pulled up on his reins.  The sleigh slowed, and the strange stags finally came to a halt.


    “I don’t think he’s very happy,” Henry observed.  “Did anyone tell him we were going to see the faeries?”


    “Let me offer to pay him more,” John Granger said, and leaned forward to attempt to negotiate in his broken Raetian.


    A great wind whistled across the snow-covered plains, and brought with it a stinging cloud of tiny particles that turned the entire world white.  Whether they were ice or snow, Claire couldn’t say for certain, but the gust forced her to close her eyes and pull the furs tight around herself.


    Through the howl of the wind, Claire suddenly heard other sounds: hooves breaking snow, the jingling of bells, and the snort of horses.  The temperature dropped even further, and she shivered from within her knot of furs.  Finally, the wind died down, and she was able to open her eyes again.


    A second sleigh had come to a halt in front of them, this one pulled by three white horses.  As Claire watched, an old man with a great white beard and a long, fur-lined coat of deep blue wool climbed out, pulled a long wooden staff after him.  He drove it into the snow and ice to use as a walking stick as he approached.


    The Raetian sleigh driver bowed his head and averted his eyes.


    “Who comes to the Kingdom of the Winter Queen and invokes her name?”  the old man asked.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    “I do,” Claire said.  “I am Lady Clarisant du Camaret-à-Arden, and these are my companions.  We were sent to Raetia by King Lionel of Narvonne to seek aid, but we were turned away by the prince.  The Horned Hunter told us to come north until we saw the colors in the sky, and call out to the Queen of Winter.  He said that she might help us.”


    “She might,” the old man said.  “Or she might not.  We shall see.  Come into my sleigh, all of you.  Pay your driver; he will not be accompanying us.”


    They pried themselves out of the warm furs, gathered up their things, and tromped through the snow over to the new sleigh.  Clarisant and Yaél were able to walk on the crust of the snow without breaking it - the girl more easily, but Claire stepped carefully.  The other three, in their armor, had to trudge through drifts up to their knees or higher.  Once John had handed over a handful of silver coins, the Raetian driver turned his team of stags - or rentier, as he had called them - and with a shout to his team sped south, leaving them alone.


    “Might I enquire your name, sir?” Claire asked the bearded man, as Dame Etoile helped her into the back of the sleigh.  She had worried that it would not hold them all, but now that she got a close look, it was larger than it had first appeared.


    “You may call me Bore,” the old man said, settling into his driver’s seat while they all re-arrange the furs in the back of the sleigh.  Claire found them to be of much higher quality than those of the Raetian driver: instead of bear and beaver, luxuriously soft pelts of white northern rabbits, foxes, and wolves were an absolute pleasure to dive into.


    “It is a pleasure to meet you, Lord Bore,” she said, once they were in and she’d made certain that Yaél was neither going to freeze to death, nor go flying out.


    “Long has it been since the Wild Hunt visited our demesne,” Bore said, watching them all get settled.  “I do not know what you have done to earn his favor, mortal woman.  Cern usually detests your kind.”


    “Women?” Etoile asked, but the old man shook his head.


    “The living.  Hold tight!”  His whip cracked, and the team of three horses shot off across the field of ice as easily as an Etalan road.  Though it seemed impossible, Bore’s sleigh travelled even faster than the Raetian’s, so that Claire had to squint against the constant spray of ice and snow that shot up around them.


    In the sky overhead, the colors grew even brighter, and moved and danced as if they were performing a masque at the court of a king.  They shimmered in veils of color, and the stars sparkled through.  There was little to do but to watch the nordlicht, and yet Claire never grew weary of the sight.  She thought that she could have watched the lights for days, and it would still never be enough.


    Finally, they came to something other than the endless plain.  It was, of course, Henry who saw it first: he had never stopped scanning the horizon, always the hunter.  “There!” he called, pointing a finger ahead, then withdrawing back into his furs with a shiver.


    “What is it?” Granger asked, but Henry shook his head.


    “Maybe a building?  Too small to be a mountain,” he said.


    As they drew closer, Claire could eventually see it, as well.  Gradually, a glitter and a shadow on the horizon resolved into an elegant palace of ice, rising up from the plain and stretching its towers toward the stars.  As the nordlicht danced above, the colors of the lights in the sky reflected off the ice, and parts of the palace shone blue or green or purple.


    “The palace of the Winter Queen,” Bore called back to them.  “Look upon her garden, and see what happens to those who come as her enemies.”


    The plain before the castle was scattered with what Claire at first took to be sculptures of ice.  She had seen the like once before, when a Raetian sculpter came to entertain at old King Lothair’s winter court.  The man had used hammer and chisel to carve great blocks of ice into flowers, animals, and other fantastic shapes, including one dancing woman that Claire had absolutely fallen in love with.


    The statues before the Winter Queen’s palace were far larger than the ones Claire had seen as a girl at Cheverny.  There were armed men, swords raised, captured in the moment of their charge.  Swordsmen, spearmen and archers.  One even rode on horseback, lance lowered.


    Bore slowed the team of horses to a walk, and they were all able to get a closer look as he wove between the statues.  “Why do they have colors inside?” Yaél asked.


    “Those aren’t sculptures,” Claire realized.  The swordsman on her right wore a cloak of gray fur, thrown back to reveal glistening, polished steel plate beneath.  She could see the brown of his eye, and thought for a moment he was looking at her.


    “As I said, my queen’s enemies,” Bore explained.  “We thought the southerners had learned long since, but we were assaulted again less than a moon ago.  You see?”


    They slid past a frozen statue much larger than the rest: beneath the ice, Claire glimpsed a form only vaguely human, with the head of some sort of wildcat, and great feathered wings spread out behind it.  The snarl of the monster’s fanged maw was filled with hate, and despite her furs she shivered at the sight.  I wonder which one that is, she thought, and grabbed her bag, with the copy of the Marian Codex she’d taken from the Cathedral of Rahab safely inside.  She would look as soon as she had a chance.


    “So the daemons have come here,” she observed, keeping the rest of her thoughts to herself.  “We are fighting them in Narvonne, also.  That should make us allies against a common enemy.”


    “We shall see,” Bore said, and pulled up the team of horses in front of the frozen gates of the great palace.  “You will enter here, and stand before Queen Beira.  She will decide what is to be done with you all.”


    He pulled his staff out again, and leaned on it when he stalked across the crusted snow to the massive doors.  Claire climbed out of the sleigh and followed him, shivering under her cloak now that she’d left the pile of furs behind.


    The gates to the frozen palace stood three times the height of a man, at least, and had been sculpted into carvings both beautiful and horrifying.  Claire thought she recognized some of the creatures depicted on those doors: monsters with wings and the parts of animals, using swords and whips and stranger weapons to torment people dressed in the garb of ancient Etalus.  Around them, a city burned, and in the background was some sort of gate.


    Before she could ask questions, Bore rapped the head of his staff against the center, where the two doors met.  The impact rang out, clear as the bells on his sleigh, and without any hand to move them, the doors swung inward, silently.


    Before them stretched a long hall, the center aisle flanked by pillars of ice on either side.  A great window was set behind a throne of white wood, and through the ice panes of the window could be seen the shimmering colors of the lights in the sky.  The thone itself was wound in holly, and covered in white furs, and on it sat a woman tall and pale.


    “Step forward,” Beira, the faerie Queen of Winter, called out, and her voice echoed down the hall.  “I would speak with the mortals.”