Robbergirl

by S T Gibson

  Helvig propped herself up on an elbow and glanced inquiringly over to the slight girl lying beside her. She didn’t look like she could last one minute in a brawl. She certainly didn’t look strong enough to wrangle wild game and drag it back to camp.

  "You’re joking."

  "Why should I be? I’m wicked with a bow and knife." Gerda fixed her with a faux somber look. "I once felled a moose single-handedly when I was out on my own in the forest without a bite to eat."

  "You didn’t!" Helvig giggled, and Gerda laughed in return, her nose crinkling like paper.

  "I'm not quite as good a liar as Rasmus, am I?"

  "Not yet, anyway."

  A strange feeling was bubbling in Helvig’s chest, making her feel lightheaded. This was a pleasure she had never known; the warmth of another girl beside her in her own bed, to whisper secrets to and giggle with.

  Gerda gave a contented sigh and burrowed deep into the softness of Helvig’s blankets, letting her eyes slip shut. When was the last time she was able to sleep in a proper bed? Helvig couldn't keep the question from crossing her mind any more than she could stop hypothesizing about who Gerda really was, underneath the ice and the formality.

  Helvig had never wondered much about her marks until now, only about how much gold they might be carrying and how long it would take them to reach the nearest town and raise an alarm. But Gerda was not a mark, and with every passing minute Helvig grew less sure that she was a powerless guest beholden to Helvig at all.

  All her life Helvig had worn imperiousness like a crown, moving through the kingdom her father had created with all the assurance divine right bestowed. But now she felt like the guest in an unfamiliar court, one that spoke a strange new language of half-truths and surreptitious glances. In the court of intrigue Gerda was queen, and she could strip Helvig bare with one flick of her eyes without ever having to reveal a single one of her secrets.

  I will riddle you out, Helvig mouthed to the dark, and then curled up on her own side of the bed. She fell asleep to the lull of Gerda’s breath beside her, as steady and hypnotic as the sound of waves breaking against rock.

  SIX

  The dream descended darkly, pulling Helvig through the cold black of unconsciousness into somewhere twilight-lit and barren.

  Icy wind lashed her hair and her face throbbed where it was pressed against the ground. Pain pounded through her veins with every beat of her heart, and fear soured her stomach

  Someone dragged up by the collar of her shirt until her toes were barely touching the ground, and Helvig’s ribs seared with pain. A fracture maybe, or bruising so deep it purpled the bone.

  Clawlike fingers tipped with fractured glass grasped her face in a vice. She was being suffocated in a grimy tangle of hair, pressed spine-creakingly tight to the chest of another woman.

  Helvig knew her by her scent, by the color of her hair.

  Astrid.

  Helvig thrashed, arching her neck almost to the breaking point, but there was no escaping the kiss lowered to her lips. Frigid water poured over her tongue and into her mouth, filling her throat to capacity.

  Helvig convulsed, but her cries were swallowed up by the crushing pressure of the demon’s mouth. Spots swam in her vision as her lungs filled with burning cold. There was no recourse, no reprieve. Unconsciousness began to set in as the creature raked fingers tenderly through Helvig's hair.

  A voice rose out of the roaring wind and wound around her like a snake.

  Stay with me.

  Stay with me here.

  Helvig flew awake with sweat drying on her skin. Breath ripped through her burning lungs in a gasp, and she choked and retched up nothing.

  Someone spoke her name in the dark and closed a cold hand around her wrist.

  Helvig thrashed, knocking her assailant with the sharp of her elbow.

  Gerda hissed out a curse in Danish and cradled her throbbing jaw.

  "Helvig, be still! It’s me; it’s just me!"

  The tent swam into focus as Helvig took in her surroundings, heart threatening to burst in her chest. She was alone here except for Gerda’s slim shape beneath her blankets.

  Now, she remembered. The kidnapping on the road, their dance of truth-telling and secret-keeping as they undressed for bed, the way Helvig had drifted off to sleep with Gerda's breath in her hair.

  Embarrassment flooded Helvig when she realized the scene she had just made.

  "Gerda," she breathed. "I’m sorry."

  Gerda’s small hand drifted up to touch Helvig’s cheek, and it came away wet. The thief didn’t even realize she was crying until she saw Gerda wipe her tears off on their bed.

  Gerda held the back of her hand to Helvig’s forehead.

  "You’re so cold! Are you falling ill-?"

  "No, I’m fine, it was…" Helvig shuddered. She had experienced the night terrors before, but always when she was alone. She had never had to explain them. "A night terror. I was being drowned, or frozen...both, I don’t know. It felt awful. Like it was real."

  Gerda made her hum of knowing.

  "You’ve been visited by an omen. I’ve seen this before, with merchants choosing between their investments or couples trying to conceive. There’s wisdom to be riddled out here."

  The witch groped for the candles Helvig kept by her bedside, and in a few moments their tent was full of the phantom glow of firelight. Gerda looked like a ghost herself as she shifted nearer to Helvig, a half-moon shoulder peeking out from her underdress.

  "I know a bit of oneirocriticism. You must tell me what you saw; I will interpret it for you."

  The thought of Gerda finding out she had been kissed in her dreams, by a woman no less, made Helvig’s chest tighten.

  "No, really, I’m alright—"

  "Did you see a great black dog? Or a smiling man with no teeth? I’ve seen him before myself; he’s very frightening. He’s a harbinger of famine, you know."

  "No, none of that, I saw…" Helvig swallowed hard. She could lie, of course, and spare herself from having to recount the whole sordid tragedy of Astrid. But maybe there was a way to protect her own secrets without pushing Gerda away. A half-truth would do the job. "...a woman. Tall and terrible and cold to the touch."

  Gerda became very still. Her features arranged themselves into a horrible expression, cavernously shadowed by the firelight. It was half fury and half terror, and Helvig became suddenly aware of how little she really knew about this girl she had invited into her bed, or what she was capable of.

  "A woman?" Gerda hissed. "Impossibly tall, with hair like a burial shroud?"

  Helvig felt cold all over.

  "Yes, she—"

  Gerda seized Helvig’s wrist. The thief would never have guessed how strong she was. Helvig grasped blindly for her knife, but her fingers clutched only air.

  Gerda pulled Helvig into the light, and just as Helvig was beginning to wonder whether she was going to have to break that pretty nose to be let go, she realized that Gerda was only examining her. With an intense, harsh scrutiny that frightened her, but only examining her.

  "God’s blood, Gerda, what are you doing?"

  Gerda’s eyes roved across Helvig’s face and throat, and then she touched her fingers to a spot on Helvig’s neck that felt tender. Helvig had not been injured when they had retired together, and the painful touch recalled her night terror moments ago. Had she clawed at herself in her sleep? Or had she somehow really been bruised by the creature that had swept her up in a dream?

  Gerda sucked air through her teeth, warding off the Devil.

  "It’s her mark. The Snow Queen’s."

  Despite her disorientation and the fear still coursing through her veins, Helvig couldn't help but laugh.

  "You’re joking."

  Gerda pulled off her charm of runes and herbs and draped it around Helvig’s neck.

  "You must sleep in this," she said, tucking it underneath Helvig’s nightshirt so the charm rested against her skin. It was still warm from lying close
to Gerda’s body. "It will protect you from her if she comes back."

  "Gerda, please, this is nonsense. How can you be sure what I saw in a dream?"

  Gerda fixed her with a dead-eyed look.

  "She kissed you and you felt as though you would die from the coldness of her, but you were powerless to escape?"

  Helvig stiffened. Was she so transparent? Did she wear her crooked nature on the outside of her skin, like a poisonous flower that bloomed scarlet to keep hungry animals away?

  "Yes, but how did you—?"

  With a ripple of blankets, Gerda was out of bed and on her feet. She snatched up the lantern.

  "Gerda!" Helvig hissed, remembering at the last moment to lower her voice. At the rate they were going they were going to wake the whole camp. "Get back into bed! This is nonsense."

  Gerda paid her no heed, just pushed her way through the tent flap, swinging a wide beam of yellow light into the night outside.

  Helvig lunged for her breeches and tugged them on crookedly.

  "Gerda! It’s pitch black, you’ll freeze!"

  But she was already gone. Helvig ripped the fur pelts from her bed, scrambling around for her knife until she found it tangled up in a blanket. Snatching it up, she darted outside.

  Gerda was standing barefoot in the snow, her thin shift ripping against her legs in the wind. Her hair writhed like a tangle of snakes as she shouted up into the night.

  "You stay away from her! I know what you are and I’m not afraid of you! I won’t let you take her!"

  Helvig had never seen someone lose their grip on sanity, though Rasmus had plenty of stories about men going mad and throwing themselves in front of bullets. She was terrified she was witnessing something like that now, and she was sorely ill-equipped to deal with it.

  "You’ll wake the entire camp," she hissed lamely, for she could think of nothing else to say. "Foolish girl!"

  Gerda spun to and fro to peer into the tops of the trees and the shadowy alleyways between tents.

  "I’m coming for you!" She continued, oblivious to the lights that were coming on in the camp, or the irritated grumbles that were rising from tents a little way off. "I’m going to find you and I’m going to get him back! I’ll kill you if I have to! Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!"

  Helvig had do something, and quickly. Coercion and speech had failed her, so she fell back on the great standby of her life: brute force.

  She threw an arm around Gerda’s mouth and began to wrestle her back towards the tent like a young reindeer gone astray from the herd. Gerda shrieked against the muzzle and kicked up snow with her tiny blue-toed feet until finally, halfway back to the tent, she relented. Helvig half ushered, half shoved her inside the tent, and then peered nervously outside her door to see if anyone was coming to investigate the ruckus.

  In the end, the sounds of irritated men’s voices died down, and the lights around camp went back out.

  "What on earth," Helvig asked, throwing the flap closed. "Was that?"

  Gerda was sitting with her head in her hands on the edge of Helvig’s bed. Her shift was wet around her calves, pressing transparent against the skin, and her poor feet looked well on their way to frostbite.

  The last time Helvig had seen a woman so possessed by emotion, it had been when one of the little children in the camp had fallen into a cooking fire, and his mother had reached in with bare hands to pull him back out. The woman’s hands had been mottled with burns for a week, but she said that she had felt nothing when she rescued her child except fear, and love. Helvig could only imagine what Gerda loved enough to make her so heedless of her own safety.

  "You’ve been visited by the white lady," Gerda said, as though this explained everything.

  Helvig pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers.

  "I had a nightmare, Gerda. There was no magical woman in a crown of ice, it wasn’t like that, it was…"

  Helvig was still frightened, and that made it increasingly hard for her to string her words together. They felt like tiny embroiderer’s beads that were slipping through her fingers and bouncing too far away for her to reach. She wanted to set Gerda straight, to clear her mind of this ridiculous bedtime story that she was so obviously fixated on, but that would involve telling the truth. Telling the whole story about Astrid, and the wedding. And Helvig didn’t think she was strong enough to do that.

  "You saw the Snow Queen," Gerda insisted. Her eyes were ferocious, lit from within by fear and other darker emotions that Helvig could not name. "She who comes in the night to poison the minds of children and steal them away."

  Helvig shucked off her breeches, wet and cold from their midnight excursion, and tossed the knife down on the bed beside Gerda.

  "Well I’m not a child, and you said The Snow Queen was a fairy story. Is she, or isn’t she?"

  Gerda pressed her lips together and refused to look at Helvig.

  A lick of anger flamed up in Helvig’s stomach, and she didn’t know what to do with it.

  "Listen, you had better start answering my questions or I’ll—"

  "Or you’ll what? Tickle me with your knife? You’re going to have to do better than that."

  Helvig curled and uncurled her fists a few times, a torrent of words building in her throat. She was sure the dam would break any moment and she would say strange and cruel things, things that would even surprise her.

  But in the end, the dyke held fast, and the river of words slithered back down into her stomach to fester.

  She took a deep breath, and then snatched up a rag from the ground. Assuming responsibility for Gerda meant watching out for her not just when she was pretty and clever, but when she was combative and frightened, too, and Helvig had made a promise to her father.

  Helvig knelt in front of Gerda and pulled one of her battered feet up into her hands.

  Gerda made a sound that was more bird than girl and yanked her shift back down over her feet.

  "What are you doing?"

  Helvig sighed heavily. The late hour was getting to her, and Gerda’s newfound ability to fly from cool reason to madness without provocation was exhausting.

  Helvig let her head slip down to rest against Gerda, forehead pressed to knee, and then straightened back up and fixed Gerda with a steely gaze. It was strange, looking up at a girl who, when standing, barely came up to Helvig’s shoulder. But it wasn’t unpleasant.

  "I won’t let you bring your freezing wet feet into my bed, and I’m worried you may have injured yourself running off into the ice like that. Sit still and it'll be over soon, and I promise it won’t hurt too much."

  "I…"

  Gerda’s voice faltered. She still wore a wild look.

  "You what? You don’t like people to touch you?" Helvig was being uncharitable, but it was difficult not to let frustration into her voice. "I’d have thought someone so well-off would be used to having ladies stoop to wash their feet."

  "My family was never wealthy," Gerda said, and Helvig was shocked to be given one of Gerda’s well-guarded personal details so thoughtlessly. Perhaps her excursion outside had rattled her, weakening her defenses. "We didn’t have house servants. I just don’t like people making a fuss over me when I’m hurt."

  "Well you’ve chosen the wrong bedmate, then. In this camp we take care of each other, and I’m responsible for my people’s health and well-being as well as their conduct. Don't shame me by refusing care when you so obviously need it." She softened her voice a bit. "There’s no need to be embarrassed."

  Gerda still looked frightened, but slowly, ever so slowly, she nudged her feet forward to where Helvig could reach. She tugged her shift up around her knees, exposing her knobby ankles and battered toes.

  Helvig washed the cuts out with the rag and melting snow the best she could, picking out woodland debris with her fingers. It could not have been comfortable, and little jolts of worry shot through Helvig every time Gerda stiffened or hissed in pain. When Jakko got something sharp lodged in his foot, Helvig
held him down and ignored his hollering while she yanked it out. But this was delicate work, and it felt more weighted.

  She glanced up to scan Gerda's face, and found that the girl was staring down at her with something close to wonder in her eyes, or bafflement.

  "Don't people ever do anything nice for you?" Helvig murmured, lowering her gaze. It was difficult to look straight at Gerda for very long.

  "Kindness always has its price."

  "Plenty of things have their price. Information, people, courts...But putting a price on kindness rather defeats the purpose, don't you think?"

  Gerda's pinched mouth was wary. Helvig had been raised to cheat and swindle and save her skin every chance she got. She was intimately acquainted with the black hearts of human beings, but she would still at least taste the grog men bought her in taverns before assuming it was poison. What could have happened to make this slip of a girl so suspicious?

  "You need to be gentler with yourself," Helvig said, massaging a warmth back into Gerda’s toes. It looked like someone had tried to take care of Gerda's feet, perhaps treating calluses and cuts with bandages or herbs, but constant wear ensured the wounds split back open before they were ever able to fully heal. "A few days off your feet as much as you can manage would do you a world of good."

  "That’s not possible," Gerda said, her voice tight. "I can’t stop. I can’t be deterred another day."

  Helvig rubbed the rag briskly up and down Gerda’s shapely calves, stimulating the flow of blood.

  "Sorry to hear that, but it doesn’t change facts. You’re staying until after the dark days, end of discussion."

  Cold steel bit into Helvig’s throat, and she froze.

  "I don’t think you’ve thought this through, birdie," Helvig said. To her credit, she kept her voice level and low. This wasn’t the first time in her life she’d had a knife to her throat, and in her line of work it was unlikely to be the last.

  Gerda tilted Helvig’s chin up with the blade until they met eyes. The thief cursed herself for being stupid enough to leave her weapon lying around where anyone could grab it, but she wasn’t fearing for her life yet. Gerda was desperate, and she was scared. She wasn’t thinking straight, and she had already proven she didn’t have the nerve to slit a throat when such things were called for.