Read Once Upon a Summer Day for Free Online

never were they different.
    And across this icy realm did Borel and his Wolves lope, clots of snow flying from boot and paw alike. And as they trotted, a track left behind, within the ice of the ice-clad trees, and within the ice of the icicles, wee Sprites followed along, some merely to turn and look and note the progress of the prince and his pack, others to somehow shift from ice-clad rock to ice-clad tree to icicles dangling down as they kept pace with Borel or gleefully raced ahead. These were the Ice-Sprites: wingless and as white as new-driven snow, with hair like silvered tendrils, their forms and faces elfin with tipped ears and tilted eyes of pale blue. They were completely unclothed, as all Sprites seemed to be, and they had the power to fit within whatever shapes ice took. And their images wavered and undulated and parts of them grew and shrank in odd ways and became strangely distorted as they sped through the uneven but pellucid layers of frozen water, the irregular surfaces making it so, rather as if they were passing through a peculiar house of mirrors, though no reflections these, but living beings within.
    As he ran, Borel glanced at the Sprites and smiled, and thereby acknowledged their presence. For they were of his demesne and subject to his command, though he seldom asked ought of them.
    It seems that in all the Forests of the Seasons, wee beings love to pace alongside travellers passing by, though now and again something or someone comes along that causes them to flee in terror. Yet in this case it was Borel and his Wolves running through the Winterwood, and Sprites accompanied them by passing from iced rock to clad tree to coated limb to frozen stream to anywhere ice clung, and they did so without seeming to have to travel the distance between: they simply were here, and then were there, all as if there were no intervening space. And as far as Borel knew, they spent their entire existence within layers of ice.
    The sun rose into the clear blue sky above, and tiny gleamings of shifting color were cast from the crystalline snow unto the eye. And across this ’scape trotted Borel and his pack, now and again passing through stark shadows cast by boulder and limb and bole to come again into the glitterbright day. And crows and ravens called through the woodland, for oft did they spend days or even weeks in the winterland. Treerunners, too, chattered and scolded and scampered along barren limbs, for they as well often came through the twilight borders unto this realm. It was as if they were compelled to bring nuts and other fare from the Autumnwood and place these stores in hollows and holes within this cold forest.
    As he had done in the Summer- and Autumnwoods, oft did Borel pause at streams and, with Ice-Sprites scattering aside, he would break through the frozen surface and quench his thirst, Wolves at his side lapping. But then he would take up the trot again, and continue on deeper into the snow-laden forest.
    He stopped as the sun gained the zenith, and all rested for a while, but before the sun had travelled two fists along its arc, Borel was up and running again.
    At times his progress was slowed by deep snow, and often did he break trail for the Wolves, though at other times they broke trail for him. On the prince and the pack ran as the sun fell through the sky, and at last dusk came upon the land, yet Borel did not pause, but kept going.
    Night came upon them, and still they coursed onward for a candlemark or so, and in the glow of a luminous full moon rising they passed across the ice of a river and followed a trail up a long slope leading to a great flat atop a bluff overlooking the wide vale below.
    As Borel and the Wolves crested the rise, they came into the lights of a great mansion. Yet, unlike stone-sided Summerwood Manor, the walls of this hall were fashioned of massive dark timbers cut square, and its roof was steeply pitched. A full three storeys high, with many chimneys scattered along