A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

Now in this case, the King had wedded…imprudently. He had lusted over the daughter of one of his lesser nobles and she was important enough—or rather her family was—that marriage was the only way to have her. She adored him. He, once his lust had cooled, was weary of her. She had presented him with only this living daughter, and that only after much striving. So now the stage was set for tragedy on a Kingdom-wide scale if he could not rein in his lusts and at least—if he must take mistresses—take only those who would not also demand marriage.

  Her mirror told her that there was one of those too-ambitious harpies waiting in the wings, hidden among the ladies-in-waiting for a chance to spring her honeyed trap and catch herself a King. And if she did…well, there were not many ways by which a King could be rid of an unwelcome spouse, particularly not when that spouse still loved him. All of those ways had consequences for the entire Kingdom. One of those was civil war.

  Which was why Aleksia was here.

  She waited impatiently through the ceremony, waited until The Traditional moment for the giving of gifts came, and stepped forward. Ruthlessly, she drew on her magic, creating an island of warmth and light about the Queen and the child, and sending waves of chill and little eddies of snowflakes everywhere else.

  “Wisdom, I give this child,” she said. “Beauty she will have in plenty from the blood of her mother and father, I need not add to that. But Wisdom I give her, and high Courage and Strength, so that she can be Queen and King to her people when the time comes. Intelligence she has in plenty, too, but I give her Craft and Cunning, so that she will know how to use whatever weapon comes to her hand to safeguard her country. And I give to her and her mother my personal protection.” And she sent out another wave of cold.

  There. Let the King hear that and dare to disinherit her….

  He heard all right. And he understood. Stammering, he thanked her, terror in his eyes. Clearly, he must know that she knew what he was about. He was not stupid, this man, only ruled too much by his nether regions. The Queen thanked her with tears in her eyes and unfeigned gratitude. She must have scented something in the offing.

  Aleksia accepted her embrace, but looked over her shoulder at the muster of her ladies, looking for one face among them.

  There.

  An exotic beauty, this one, by the standards of this Court. Here among the blond was a night-crow indeed, slim where they were sturdy, dark where they were light. And she paled when she saw Aleksia’s eye on her, paled still further when she read Aleksia’s message in her gaze.

  Go. Go as far as you can. And do not come back.

  The compulsion was set upon her, and Aleksia left, knowing that, before the day was out, the King’s supposed love would be gone. Where, was of no concern to her.

  And that was that. She sensed the powerful energies of The Tradition turning away, having now no more interest in this place.

  She left as she had come, the epitome of chill perfection. Back to the Palace of Ever-Winter, a spoiled brat she needed to tame, and the knowledge that she was going to have to give up her pleasant evenings “with” the Sammi Mages. The King himself escorted her to her sleigh, and the look of terror in his eyes did not make up for the fact that she was not going to hear any more of Lemminkal’s kantele playing, nor Ilmari’s tales and jokes.

  Duty. Bah.

  CHAPTER 5

  “THEY SAY SHE IS CALLED THE SNOW QUEEN, AND SHE IS AS cold as the snow itself.” Ulla regarded them all solemnly. The young women had the hearth of the cottage to themselves; Rikka’s parents had gone to bed, leaving them in sole possession of the main room of the cottage. Kaari and Suvi-Marja were carefully manipulating the wooden cards for their ornamental bands; since they were both weaving patterns in red and the natural dark brown and white of sheep’s wool, weaving by firelight was not a problem. Rikka’s needle continued to make the intricate knots of her mittens, but Ulla’s spindle was idle.

  “It is the Snow Queen,” Ulla began, after looking nervously over her shoulder.

  “But she is only a legend!” Rikka protested. “No one has ever seen her. Not that I ever heard of anyway. And anyway, how could she possibly be real? She must be over a thousand years old by now.”

  Kaari kept her hands moving steadily, but she felt a kind of chill on the back of her neck, and suddenly the fire did not seem to be warming her.

  “Father’s cousin knows someone who saw her,” Ulla said firmly. “From a distance, a great distance, but he saw her, flying through the sky in her white sleigh. But that is not the point. The point is that where once she merely remained in her Palace of Snow, content to keep it always Winter only where she dwelled, now that is changing.” Ulla shuddered. “Now she is taking young men who attract her, taking them in the night, and they are never seen again. And now—now she is killing. Whole villages, it is said, stricken with a deadly cold that strikes the villagers without warning, freezing them where they stand.”

  Kaari concentrated very hard on the patterns she was weaving. She did not in the least like what she was hearing. Normally on such nights, she was able to listen as avidly as the others were, to take it in with a delicious shiver, to feel the danger, and yet know, in her heart of hearts, that it would never affect her.

  Not tonight. She could not think why, but it felt as if there was some terrible thing out there in the darkness—looming over her, looking at her, and chuckling, coldly, as it slowly tightened its invisible grip about her.

  She didn’t want to hear any more. And yet she did not, could not, stop Ulla from continuing her stories. In the end, it was Rikka, not her, who asked for an end to it, who managed to turn the conversation into more cheerful topics, and who managed to make them all laugh.

  Eventually, it grew late enough that Suvi-Marja’s parents began coughing pointedly. Taking the hint, the three visitors rolled up their work, stowed it in the baskets they had brought with them, and affectionately took their leave of their friend.

  All but Kaari, who felt a reluctance to venture out in the dark, chill night—a night so powerful, it verged on revulsion. Impulsively, she turned to Suvi-Marja, seeking an excuse.

  But she didn’t have to make up one. It was her friend that put one hand on her arm and looked at her entreatingly. “Can you stay the night?” she begged. “Oh, Kaari…I so want to ask your advice, and mayhap your help, and I did not want to do so around the others—” She bowed her head and flushed “—You all have had so many sweethearts, and I have only had the one—”

  Relief made her feel giddy. She often stayed the night with her friends, particularly when they did not have such enormous families as hers. Her mother would not take it amiss that she had done so tonight. “Suvi! Of course I will! But do not hold out too much hope of my being terribly wise, for wisdom you should ask your mother—”

  Even in the dying firelight, Kaari could see her friend blushing. “Oh, I could never ask my mother these things. She thinks that Essa is nice enough, but that I could do much better…I cannot make her understand.”

  Whatever Suvi-Marja’s mother did or did not understand, in that moment, Kaari understood her very well and what she was trying to say. Poor Suvi! She was not ugly, but she was not as pretty as most of her friends. All her life, she had been in the shadow of the others and had become resigned to that position. And now, there was a young man…and now, she was afraid and a little confused and very conflicted.

  So she spent no small amount of time reassuring her. It was true that Essa was not a fabulous catch as a husband, if all you looked at was how prosperous he would be. But he was kind—in his own fashion, he was thoughtful—and he did care for Suvi. And if it was not wild, obsessive, passionate love, the sort of thing that they made songs about—the sort of things that they made songs about was not at all comfortable, nor safe, and Suvi liked comfort and safety.

  So they talked for a very long time together by the light of the fire, with Kaari reassuring her friend. And by the time they slept, Suvi was smiling again and Kaari was only a l
ittle uneasy about the strange stories out of the North.

  * * *

  Perhaps I was a little overenthusiastic, Annukka thought, looking a bit ruefully, and yet with pardonable pride, at a smokehouse so full of pig and venison sausage that it could not have held another link. She closed the door on it all, sealing the door tightly with wax from her hives. She would not open it again for another three days, by which time the sausages would be cured and ready to hang in the rafters, where they would get a bit more smoke, which would do them no harm.

  Now, every year, she sat up all night on the first full moon of Autumn, the first harvest moon, and sang for a full, rich harvest. But this year, something—she was not sure what, a feeling of unease perhaps, or just the small indications that the Winter would be hard, cold and long—had prompted her to put a little more emphasis in her song than usual. She absolutely would not interfere with the weather—be it sent by gods or the winds, it was not hers to meddle with. But there was no harm in singing for enough, even abundance, to carry the village through a bad Winter, if one was to come. If the weather was to be that bad, things would die in the cold anyway, and if a few more birds and fish and animals died now, beneath the hunters’ hands, it was a quicker, easier death than starving to death or freezing in the night. It was a good balance. It was also a good balance to ask the crops to be abundant—if the Winter was a hard one, then an abundant crop now meant that there would be seed to plant when Spring came.

  So she sat up and sang, for everyone with a Mage rune knew that the most powerful spells were sung, not spoken. There was something about music, and the way it was easy to get lost in it, the way it was easy to call up mental images of what you wanted, that made sung magic, for the Sammi at least, that much more powerful.

  Now it seemed that her spells had been very effective indeed. The cellars were full of beets, onions, turnips and cabbage, dried blueberries, lingonberries and cloudberries, dried mushrooms, sacks of rye and barley flour, sacks of whole barley, stacks of dried cheese, waxed wheels of aging cheese, casks of dried and salted fish, potted birds and meat. Hams and sausage hung from every ceiling. Cupboards were full of preserved pots of butter, lard, jam and honey. The entire village had been feasting for days on the traditional foods of Autumn, butchery-time—blood pancakes, blood dumplings, blood soup, fried cracklings, stews and soups rich with meat scraps, and dishes made with various organs that could not be preserved—for nothing, nothing went to waste, not even, or especially, in times of abundance. Fish had almost been leaping into the nets, and game flung itself in the way of the hunters. There were peddlers and traveling entertainers coming through at this time of year, and they generally tried to spend as much time as they could in the villages that had a reputation for generous hospitality. The Sammi did not have harvest fairs of the sort that Annukka had heard of; Autumn was too busy a time for that. But anyone that came through was more than welcome to partake of the ongoing feast of things that could not be stored for the Winter.

  One such peddler, very, very fond of Annukka’s sausages, had just been through. He had left with some of the first batch of the season stowed in his cart, and she was now the owner of a curious and very beautiful mother-of-pearl comb. That might have seemed a very uneven trade for a couple of strings of sausages, but he had confided in her that no one wanted it once they heard he had traded for it with one of the seal-people.

  Now she had no particular aversion for the seal-people, although it was generally held to be bad luck for someone who made his living fishing to have anything of theirs. After all, they might want it back, and their way of getting it back might well be to drown you….

  But the peddler, who she knew to be an honest fellow, had sworn he had come by it honorably. And it was a lovely piece, carved with swirling waves and fronds of kelp. She intended to give it to Kaari for her bride’s-gift.

  As she sealed up the door of the smokehouse, she smiled a little, thinking about that particular peddler. He was the one with the most beautiful pieces of amber, and sweet ambergris for making scents. Suvi-Marja had seen one particular necklace in his store, three big drops like huge drops of honey, suspended from a delicate chain of amber beads, and it was clear to anyone with eyes that she wanted the piece. Between the two of them, she and Kaari had managed to put it into Essa’s thick skull that this would be a grand betrothal token for Suvi, and even more cleverly, managed to make him believe that he had thought of it.

  I wonder if she has even taken it off to wash, Annukka thought with powerful amusement. Well, at least that was settled. She had known Essa since his birth, and never once had she known him to go back on a thing once he had decided to do it. That girl was as good as married this moment.

  But the recollection of the peddler suddenly made her frown, because goods were not the only things that peddlers brought with them. They also brought news. And some of his stories were…disquieting.

  There had always been tales of a strange, magical creature that some called the Winter Witch, some the Ice Fairy and others the Snow Queen. She was said to live up so far north—or else, in the mountains—that there was no other season but Winter there. That was not at all disturbing. There were all manner of things in that region that were magical in nature. If she were to concern herself with all of them, she would spend her time constructing defenses and never get anything done. This creature had been up there for generations, it seemed, and most of the stories were about people who had been stupidly or criminally foolish and had essentially gotten their comeuppance.

  But these stories were different. The creature had suddenly turned malicious, and rather than sitting in her fortress or castle or ice-cave or whatever it was she lived in, she was extending her domain into places she had never been known to walk before. There were stories now of a Winter come so early that the snow caught apples not yet ripe on the trees, and grapes were frozen on the vine. There were stories of a killing kind of cold that swept down out of nowhere and froze birds and animals in their place. And there were stories of young men just—taken. For no apparent reason.

  So far, none of those stories had been about anywhere too near the Sammi “kingdom” of Karelia. But Annukka knew her tales, and she knew that when bad things were on the move, they didn’t stop for borders.

  She bent down to apply the wax she was warming to the crack where the door met the frame. The rest of the smokehouse was tightly chinked with moss and clay, so this would be the only place where smoke could get out except the vent in the roof. It was taking extra care like this that made her sausages so good. And there was nothing like sausage on a cold morning.

  If the Sammi had an enemy, it was Winter. There was not enough in the way of riches here for anyone to want to conquer their land; they were in no way strategic; and the very nature of the people, so dependant on the reindeer herds as they were, made them difficult to confine and fight. Sammi warriors did not make stands. Sammi warriors faded into the forest and the snow, struck from shadows, let the landscape wear the enemy down. Not that they did not, individually, fight valiantly toe-to-toe with the best of them! But as an army, as a force—no. When they organized, it was to divide the enemy, make him come to ground of their choosing and fight him as ghosts in the night.

  But they could not do that with Winter. Winter was implacable. Winter’s cold sought you out and tried to kill you and could not be hidden from. The only defenses against Winter were food, shelter and warmth. As the days grew shorter and the nights longer, there was always that fear in the back of every mind: what if the sun faded and never returned? What if the night and the cold were forever? What if this was the season when the battle ended and Winter won?

  Annukka shivered and walked back to the house. She had another wheel of cheese to coat with wax before she put it down in the cellar.

  No one spoke of this fear, although the oldest songs, the strong magic songs, did. Strong magic had to acknowledge fear in order to conquer it. But that was what all the celebration at MidWint
er was about, at bottom. There was the long watch through the darkest night of the year, the hope of driving back the dark with fire, of driving back hardship and privation with feasting, the driving back of the cold with the warmth of fellowship. And in the dawn, when the sun truly did rise again, there was rejoicing and a relief that was the stronger for being unspoken. The people had survived; they would live until Spring.

  Of course, people could—and did—die between MidWinter and Spring, but somehow it never seemed as terrible an omen—unless the year had been so bad that stores were scant to begin with. Even then, this village had a most fortunate location. There was good hunting and good fishing, even in the middle of Winter.

  But this year, unless the Winter never ended, there would be no need to fear the coming of the snow, even if it began early.

  She could not help the thought that followed, as she checked the pot of beeswax beside the fire to see if it had melted yet. And what if Winter never ends?

  She banished that thought with another. If there is some great and terrible Magic at work, then the Wonder-smiths, the Warrior-Mages, the Wise and the Shamans will band together and defeat it. It might be difficult to get the Sammi to fight together, but it was not impossible.

  That internal voice chuckled a little. Difficult? No more difficult than teaching a cat to herd reindeer.

  “Stop that, you!” she said aloud, glad that there was no one about to hear her. Well, other than the cat, who jumped at the sound of her voice and looked guilty, then immediately turned the guilty look to one of nonchalance. “And you may stay out of the cheese!” she scolded, not sure what the cat was getting into before she made it jump, but knowing that the likeliest thing was the cheese it had been eyeing.

  The cat put his tail in the air and sauntered away, very clearly conveying that he had no interest in the cheese, and she was incredibly rude to think so, and worse to say so. After all, someone might be listening. A cat had his dignity to think of. The nerve!