Winter's Bride - Candace Wondrak Page 0,8

and courage; things her family hated to see in her, but things I found spectacular. I found myself watching her perhaps a bit too much, especially once she grew older.

I’d never had a bride. I wasn’t like my brother, in that he was lonely and constantly searching for someone to make him feel whole. I did not lock myself away in that castle; I was constantly out and about, and even though I was invisible to the humans, half the time I felt as if I was one of them. I was never lonely, not until the night I watched Morana give herself to a merchant’s boy.

Of course, I didn’t really watch. She was still young, and I knew they deserved privacy, even though they could not see me. But that night was when the seed was planted inside my head, when I started to wonder what it would be like to take a human bride and share my world with her.

Would she like to travel between villages and grant people boons? Would she enjoy the freedom I could offer? I found myself wondering all these things and more.

I’d tried to get my brother to leave his castle, to come out, to walk with me through the human streets and see them, truly see them for what they were, but he never did. He refused to leave the grounds of his castle; if he’d been human, he would’ve wasted away into nothing a long time ago. Alas, human he was not, nor was I.

My brother, Winter, was as cold as ice. He called himself Abner, just as I preferred Ishan. Though we were brothers, though we were both gods in a way, the similarities ended there. My skin was dark, touched by the sun, my hair a light brown with a few honey-colored strands. My eyes were a warm amber hue, while my brother’s were like frozen ice when the sun shined on it. My brother’s skin was pale, his hair colorless in its whiteness. We viewed the humans differently, searched for opposite things.

Until now, it seemed.

Until the day when Morana’s sister was chosen as Abner’s bride, and Morana volunteered to take her place.

I’d been there, I’d been watching. I always did, when it came time for my brother to search once more for a bride to fill his loneliness. He was cursed, in a way, cursed to crave the one thing he would never get… and now I was beginning to wonder if I was cursed, too.

The first human who I’d thought about showing myself to, the first human girl who’d had me wrapped around her finger from when she was a mere child… and she would belong to my brother.

Fate must be laughing at us all.

My heart dropped when Morana volunteered, and it sunk to the ground when my brother’s messenger agreed. I watched them ride off with the rest of the town, standing amongst them, even though none could see me. Her family was upset, her sister the most, understandably so.

Why? Why would Morana volunteer to wed Winter? She was favored by me, not my brother. If she should belong to anyone, she should belong to me.

I thought about teleporting to my brother’s palace and speaking with him, telling him to force his messenger to let Morana go and find a different bride from a different village. After all, there were countless villages scattered around the kingdom between our castles, so many other girls who would make a decent bride for Abner.

What stopped me from doing that was the fact that my brother would inquire as to why I was so vehement against him wedding Morana, and I would have to tell him the truth, the truth that suddenly appeared before me not too long ago.

What was the truth, you ask?

I wanted her. I wanted her to be mine. I wanted to have all of Morana’s smiles, her free spirit and her warmth. I wanted to give her everything a human lover could not, open her eyes to the world beyond the mortal realm.

And I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t tell my brother the truth because I’d spent so long dancing in his peripherals, acting like I was on another level, that I was better than him because I did not yearn for someone to temper the flames inside my soul. Abner… my brother would never admit it aloud, but he searched for a bride that would reignite the passion inside him, be the heat to his