A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  The forest through which she was trudging was not the sort inclined to raise the spirits. “Gloomy” was probably the most flattering thing that could be said about it. There was no undergrowth, for the trees that crowded each other on either side of the dirt road blocked out the sun. Those trees were, for the most part, black pine, whose dark branches dripped water and occasionally sap, and dropped needles that carpeted the floor of the forest. Overhead, their branches formed a canopy so thick that not even a scrap of sky was visible. If there were birds, they were high up in the boughs and certainly not visible from the girl’s point of view. There were no animals in sight, but one could easily imagine wolves or Bears lurking in the distance, suitably obscured by the closely crowded tree trunks. Even on the hottest of Summer days, this forest would be dank and chill. Now, in the Autumn, with sunset drawing near, it would be bitter under those trees. And it would be so damp that the cold would penetrate even the warmest of cloaks. Small wonder she was bundled up as she was.

  There was no sound, though Aleksia could easily have it if she chose. Right now, though, she knew that all she would hear was oppressive silence, overlaid perhaps with the dripping of water onto a thick layer of dead needles, and the girl’s soft footsteps, and perhaps the far-off call of a crow or some other bird of ill-omen. Hardly worth the trouble.

  Kay, of course, could see none of this. All he saw was Aleksia staring into a mirror that cast no reflection. And ignoring him. He did not in the least appreciate being treated in this way. Aleksia caught his reflection off the ice. The corners of his mouth turned down farther, his eyes narrowed and a crease appeared between his brows. And then he spoiled it all, as his lower lip began to protrude in the start of a pout. For all that he allegedly wanted to be left alone, he hated being ignored. But then, Aleksia knew very well what was actually going on in her guest’s mind.

  “And you, of course, have such a vast experience of Fairy Godmothers,” Aleksia finally answered him, in a voice that dripped with sarcasm the way that the trees in her mirror dripped moisture. Her voice rang crisp in the empty chamber—utterly calm, and maddening. At least, she hoped it was maddening. She shifted again, this time for the little pleasure of feeling the silk of her gown slip across her body.

  Kay started at the sound of her voice, then glowered. He hated having his “authority” challenged even more than he disliked being ignored. Aleksia would have found it more amusing had she not played this same sort of scene over and over again with other guests in the past and would play it with still more in the future. Still. It was potentially as funny as watching an ill-tempered rabbit challenge a warhorse.

  And that was a dangerous stance to take in the hall of one who could have sent him outside to be eaten by an ice-drake by merely snapping her fingers, but he was very young and utterly convinced of his own intelligence, knowledge and immortality. “I—” he began.

  “Most of your sentences begin with I, and you might find it more profitable to find some other way to begin them,” Aleksia continued, still not turning from the mirror. She wished that the next act of the drama she was watching would hurry up. She was regretting deciding to allow Kay to find her today—but this was the only mirror powerful enough to let her see all she needed to, from so far away, and she hated asking the Brownies to move it. “No one cares about you. You are an unlicked cub, a mere youth, barely out of childhood.” She had been longing to say this for days; she might as well do so now. She began to warm to her subject and chose her words with care. “You have no experience worth hearing about, no store of wisdom from reading or studying with wiser men and your personality is repellant. There was but one person who loved you, and you persisted in thrusting her away. Instead, you wanted to be left alone to concentrate on your work. You were, in fact, injudicious enough to wish for just that out loud.” She saw him start again, out of the corner of her eye. “So. I have given you that, on condition that you devote yourself to your work and make me wonders. There is a library here. There is a workshop. You only have but to say that you want something, and it appears. Go and make use of these resources, for which older and wiser men than you have pined and languished. And when you find something or make something you think might be worthy of my attention, you may bring it to me, provided I am not otherwise occupied, and provided you begin your sentence with some other word than I.”

  Reflected in the surface of the ice, Kay looked utterly, utterly shocked. No one had ever spoken to him like that before. He had been rather too much indulged and made much of by parents who thought he was clever; as a child, he’d had the best schooling and a mother and father who greeted every accomplishment as if he was the only boy in the universe to have achieved such things. And he was very clever, even Aleksia would admit that—but clever did not compensate for the level of self-absorption he had managed to achieve in seventeen years. When she had appeared before him on the night of the first frost—heralded by an out-of-season snowstorm—in her flying sleigh pulled by four snow-white reindeer, he had taken it as his due that such a creature should offer him her help. He had accepted her invitation, of course. There was never any doubt that would happen. He was too self-centered to consider that it could have been a trap.

  And now he had been here for three weeks, seeing nothing and no one but Aleksia herself. She had made her servants and helpers invisible to him, so that he would be unaware how full the Palace really was, and so that he would be unable to talk to anyone. She had made herself unavailable to him as well, making it as clear as possible, without ever actually saying it, that she was far too important to cosset him.

  And now, he found himself in the position of having everything he had asked for, and yet being subject to something he had never, in all his life, actually experienced before.

  He was alone. There were no parents to praise him, no sweetheart to gaze at him with adoration, no rivals to triumph over or peers to boast to. There were not even any visible servants to question, look down upon or bully. It was just him and his own thoughts, and he was finding that an uncomfortable experience.

  He was a prisoner in a cage made of gold and lined with silk, as isolated as any hermit-hunter snowed-in inside a mountain cabin. He took his meals alone, was attended but never contacted in any way, and only glimpsed her briefly, generally at a distance. Day by day, she watched him without his being aware of the fact, and saw it wear on him.

  Today she had told the servants to allow him to find the throne room and her in it, rather than confusing his steps as they generally did. This was the result.

  He could be redeemed—he would not be here, in the Palace of Ever-Winter, the home of the Ice Fairy, if he was not capable of redemption. The Tradition had made that part clear enough by building such an enormous store of magic about him that, if Aleksia had waited until Winter to fetch him, he would have found his initials written in frost on the windowpane, snowmen having taken on his features when he passed, and the cold having grown so bitter that wildlife would have been found frozen in place. Even so, things had gotten to the point that Ravens had taken to following him, which was a very ominous sign had he but known it. Presumably if Aleksia had done nothing, and no other wicked magician had discovered him and virtually eaten him alive for the sake of that power, he would have gone to the bad all by himself. He was too self-centered and arrogant to have escaped that particular fate—and most likely, given his turn of mind, he would have become a Clockwork Artificer, one of those repellant individuals who tried to reduce everything to a matter of gears and levers, and tried to imprison life itself inside metal simulacrums. While not usually dangerous to the public at large the way, say, the average necromancer was, Clockwork Artificers could cause a great deal of unhappiness—and in their zeal to recreate life itself, sometimes resorted to murder.

  Judging by the Ravens, Kay would have become one of that sort.

  The only cure for this affliction was a shock, a great shock to the system. One that forced the youngster to confront himself,
one that isolated him from the rest of the world immediately, rather than gradually. He had to lose those he still cared for, at least marginally, all at once. He had to learn that people meant something to him, before they ceased to.

  “It’s lonely here!” Kay complained, with a touch of shrillness, still not stirring from where he stood beside her throne. Well she certainly hoped it was! She would not have been doing her job otherwise.

  She cast him a glance. Yes, definitely. He was unhappy, but not quite at the depth to which she wanted him to descend. Soon he would be profoundly unhappy, and he would understand just what it meant to get what you wish for, when what you wish for is to take yourself out of the ranks of humankind.

  She looked back at the mirror to see shadows slipping through the tree trunks. Ah. There they are. It took two to make this dance, and Kay’s little friend Gerda, the girl who loved him with all her heart, who was currently trudging toward the next episode in her own little drama, was the coconspirator in The Traditional Path that ended in a Clockwork Artificer. Her nature was as sweet as her face, her will as pliant as a grass-stem and her devotion to Kay unswerving, no matter how often he neglected her. She needed redemption almost as much as Kay did. Such women married their coldhearted beloveds, made every excuse for them, smoothed their paths to perdition, turned a blind eye to horrors and even, sometimes, participated in the horrors themselves on the assumption that the Beloved One knew best. Gerda required a spine, in short, and an outlook rather less myopic than the one she currently possessed. And this little quest she was on was about to give her one.

  This had all been very carefully orchestrated, because if a Godmother didn’t manipulate the participants in these dramas, The Tradition most certainly would. Everything had been planned to a nicety. Aleksia had called up a magical snowstorm in a very limited area around Kay’s house. She had done so at an hour when she knew that Gerda would be in her little bedroom, probably looking out of her window, sighing at Kay’s. When the snow began, Aleksia caused a gust of wind to drive a few hard snow pellets against Gerda’s window to ensure that if she had not been looking out it before, she most certainly would be when Aleksia’s flying sleigh came swooping out of the sky. It all worked, of course. As Kay studied the unseasonable snowflakes, Gerda was in place, watching from the window in plenty of time to see the sleigh land. Gerda saw Aleksia speaking to a dumbfounded Kay, saw her offer him her hand, saw her settle him in beside her, bundled in white furs, and saw the sleigh rocket off again.

  Nor was that all. No Godmother worth her wand would leave things so half done. Aleksia had contacted one of the village Witches and made sure Gerda knew who had taken Kay, and in general, where he was.

  Poor Gerda! Screwing up her courage to visit the Witch in the first place was only the beginning of her ordeal. She would never have believed it if she had been told the truth, that her childhood sweetheart was turning into a remote and arrogant elitist all by himself, so she had been told that the Snow Queen had done something to him as a child, made him coldhearted, so that she could whisk him off now. Gerda had also been told that she, and she alone, could melt Kay’s heart and save him with her love—and being a young maiden of romantic nature, and wanting it to be true, she absolutely believed what she had been told.

  Up until she had entered the forest, things had been relatively easy for her. Her sweet nature made people like her and want to help her. She had actually done very little walking up to this point; farmers had given her rides in carts, horsemen had taken her up behind them, peddlers had offered her space in their wagons. The trek into this forest, however, had been made without meeting anyone who could help, and at this point, she was footsore and very weary. Now she was about to find out that the quest was going to have a lot more hardship involved in it than a few blisters.

  The shadows flitting through the woods, having ascertained that the girl was all alone, had surrounded her. Now they pounced—because they were robbers, and she was very tasty-looking prey.

  The robbers materialized from among the tree trunks, crowing with glee at having caught such a pretty little prize. Gerda froze in abject fear; her mouth opened in a silent scream of terror and her face went as white as frost.

  There. Nicely managed.

  Aleksia dismissed the vision in the mirror with a thought and a simple wave of her hand, then turned to Kay. She schooled her face into an expressionless mask. She must seem as remote as a snow statue now. Mostly she was feeling a mixture of amusement and annoyance. Amusement, because Kay had no idea he was not unique, that he was treading a path already worn down by countless others. Annoyance, because, well, Kay was Kay.

  “It is lonely here, because that is what you asked for,” she said, crisply, thinking that she was going to be only too glad to have this over and done with. He was intelligent enough, or so she hoped, that she would not have to go through this speech more than once. “Or do you fail to remember?”

  “Remember?” Kay’s handsome brow furled. And he was a handsome young fellow, as blond and blue-eyed as Gerda. If his chiseled features habitually wore an expression as cold and forbidding as that on the marble bust of a religious fanatic—when he wasn’t pouting like a spoiled child told there was no candy forthcoming—that didn’t make the arrangement of his features less pleasing. If his natural complexion was too fair to wear black well, he was certainly handsome enough in other colors. And on the rare occasion that he smiled, his face was quite transformed, and showed exactly why Gerda had fallen in love. There was a heart in there. It just needed waking up. And if anyone could wake it, it would be Aleksia. This was not the first such guest she’d had in the Palace of Ever-Winter, and he would not be the last.

  “Yes. Remember.” Aleksia looked down at him from the lofty height of her “ice” throne—carved crystal made to look like spires and shards of ice that was cunningly provided with a spell that made it warm as a living thing when she sat on it, but as cold as what it looked like if anyone else dared set derriere to seat.

  Kay had, of course, made the attempt, and been discomfited before he got much of a chance to make himself at home. She had watched, invisible, as he had given up after not too very long.

  He was always cold, here. The very food was cold, or lukewarm at best. His bed was cold at night and did not warm up until his shivering body warmed it. The temperature in the rooms he roamed was always chill. His clothing was, unlike hers, just a trifle…thin; the fur trim did nothing but look soft, and the velvet was not thick enough to keep the chill away. Hers, when she must share the same space as he did, was warm and sometimes fur-lined; even her hands were kept warm—with a tiny touch of magic.

  He, who had always thought that Winter brought perfection, who preferred Winter because it brought snowflakes, glass-smooth ponds and all ugliness covered with pure white, now was coming to find that he did not desire the cold nearly as much as he had thought.

  He looked baffled; she sighed with feigned impatience. “The night when you and Gerda saw the falling star,” she elaborated. “You both made wishes. You wished that you could go somewhere far from people, where you would not be bothered anymore, and where you could have time for your studies and inventions.” She waved a hand at the implied expanse of the Palace beyond the throne room. “You wished that it would always be Winter, so that perfection could be preserved. You desired that you should be served invisibly, imperceptibly, so that nothing could intrude on your thoughts. Here you have all that. I fail to see why you are less than content.” She made a shooing motion. “GO. Study. I brought you here so that you could create wonders. Leave me in peace until you have something to show me.”

  Long habit made it possible for her to repress her smile as Kay slouched out of the room. His shoulders were hunched, his hands balled into fists at his sides. He was angry but at the moment, he was not sure who to be angry with. Himself? He had gotten what he asked for. Her? She had given him what he asked for. As yet, he did not look any deeper than that. She hoped that he w
ould, that he would see the fundamental wrongness of what he wanted, and why. Otherwise—well, something else would have to be done about him.

  Any urge to smile faded once he was gone; she did not want to have to think about what would happen if she could not salvage him. She failed very rarely, but when she did fail, it meant she must act as an evil magician would—drain him of the magic building around him and place him somewhere that it could not build again. With some primitive tribe perhaps, but certainly in a land where he did not know the language and could not ever become a Clockwork Artificer. This would effectively ruin two lives, his and the girl’s.

  She shook her head to clear it of the melancholy thought. She had not lost yet. She was not even close to that point.

  She surveyed her surroundings with a sigh. Other than the benches around the walls, the only two pieces of furniture were the clear crystal throne and the clear ice mirror. She would have used crystal there, too—except that she was the Ice Fairy. The Tradition made it so much easier to enchant things if they were made of ice.