A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  She was still laughing at the affronted cat when Kaari came flying up the path, face white, something wrapped in cloth in her hands. As she burst through the door, Annukka could see that she was sobbing.

  “Mother—Mother!” she wailed. “It is Veikko!” She held out the bundle before Annukka could say anything, her hands shaking. The cloth fell away from it, and Annukka saw a little silver cup had been wrapped in it. “Before he left, we shared a loving-cup!” The girl sobbed. “He knew the spell—he said that it would keep me from worrying if he couldn’t find a messenger to bring me letters, that as long as it was polished and shining, I would know he was safe. Last night it was fine, bright silver, not a speck of black. I looked at it just now—and look!”

  Annukka, who knew very well what the Loving-Cup spell was, since she had taught it to her son, looked at the silver vessel in mute horror.

  It was black from base to top, with only a thin silver line left near the bottom. Annukka knew exactly what this meant.

  Veikko was in deadly danger.

  * * *

  Aleksia was back in the throne room, at the ice-mirror. Today, her gown was a sweeping creation of white velvet trimmed in white fox and lined with white mink, with a belt of plaques of silver holding faceted crystals, and a crown to match. Her hair was done up in a severe knot. She was warm and comfortable, but looked chilly and utterly unapproachable. It would take a very brave man indeed to do so. The throne room was especially cold today, because she expected Kay at any moment.

  Meanwhile Gerda’s second trial, her captivity among the robbers, was coming to a turning point, and Aleksia needed to keep a very sharp eye on it indeed. She was not inclined to trust any of this to luck.

  The robbers had learned that Gerda was not rich, that her parents were very far away indeed. Since they were all completely illiterate, to reach them and demand a ransom—even if one could be paid—one of their number would have to spend most of a month traveling to her city, and then, when he got there, somehow convince them that the girl he had was her. The rest of the band would have to trust him to bring back the money—and cows would be flying like swallows before that happened. And in his turn, he would have to keep from being captured; pigs would be joining the flying cattle if he managed it. The robbers themselves were not going to trust him with money for his journey out of their own stores, which meant that, to make that trip, he would be resorting to robbery, but doing so alone and out of the forest. The bandit in the forest and the robber in the city were two very different creatures. And neither functioned very well in the environment of the other.

  Though illiterate, they weren’t fools and had worked all of this out for themselves. That meant that anything they were going to get from Gerda in the way of material goods, they had already gotten.

  Now this group of men were looking at Gerda in an entirely different fashion. There were, after all, only two women here, and the Chief’s daughter was not to be touched, or even looked at impertinently. Not just because the Chief would gut the offender, but because Valeri would castrate him, then let her father gut him.

  Now, it was true that Valeri had claimed Gerda for her own personal servant. It was also true that Valeri had lost interest in things after a while. The pet rabbit she had once that had escaped, the fawn she had raised that became venison roast when she wearied of trying to keep it in a pen, the various “ladylike” pursuits she had attempted and dropped when she was no good at them. The truth was, Valeri was more at home in breeches than skirts, happier with her hair chopped short than being braided and fussed over, more apt with a knife and a bow than a needle and a pan. She’d had a fancy to play lady and had seized on Gerda to be her lady’s maid. But the men knew that, sooner or later, she would tire of the game and, they hoped, of Gerda.

  And even if she didn’t, the word of the Chief was law even to his daughter. If the men all banded together and demanded the girl, they would get her. They had not yet gotten to the point of banding together—each still hoped to get her for himself alone—but they would.

  And soon.

  Winter had already come to that forest, and there would be no more travelers coming through to be preyed upon. The band was snowed in; their hideout was part cave and part a stoutly built fortress of stone and massive logs. Aleksia was fairly sure that they didn’t know who had built the place originally, and probably would never have dared to use it if they had known.

  Trolls. Only trolls were big enough to have felled the trees these logs came from, and strong enough to move them here. Why they had built this place, Aleksia had no idea, nor why they had abandoned it. Perhaps a Hero had come along and tricked them into the sunlight. Perhaps they had just wandered off. They might come back today, tomorrow, a hundred years from now, or never.

  This mattered not at all to the current situation. And it was very important this time that Aleksia hear what was going on. Her point of view was a huge old mirror, very dusty and tarnished, that had been shoved over against the wall of this, Valeri’s room in the outer fortress. Her father, Aleksia had learned, had claimed this room as her nursery long ago because it had a fireplace. She had kept it because she liked her privacy.

  Aleksia could only hear and see through reflective surfaces, although it was surprising how many of those there were that people were not aware of. A drop of water in a forest, the shiny surface of a metal cup, even a bit of mica embedded in a rock wall—any and all of those were enough for her to see and hear through. So it didn’t matter how tarnished and dusty this old mirror was, it still served.

  “Give over,” Valeri said, pushing Gerda’s hands away from her head. “And hand me that knife. I’m tired of this.”

  Gerda picked up the scissors instead. “If you are going to have your hair chopped off, let me do it and make it tidy,” she retorted. “You don’t have to go about looking like a magpie’s nest.”

  The Robber Girl snorted, but let Gerda cut her hair for her, long black tresses falling around her like Autumn leaves. When she was done, Gerda handed her a hand-mirror and she surveyed the result and grunted her approval. Her hawk-sharp face was suited to the shorter hair, Aleksia thought. Having it braided up made such a face, all angles and planes, look even more angular than it already was. “This business of being a lady gives me a pain,” she announced. “It was fun to play at it, but it gives the men ideas. I don’t want ’em thinking of me as somethin’ they can pounce on.”

  “Like me, you mean,” Gerda replied steadily.

  There was silence in that cramped, cluttered room. Then Gerda bent over, picked up all the hair and tossed it into the fire without a word. Valeri took out her knife, cut the women’s clothing she was wearing off herself, and pulled on her usual leather breeches, heavy woolen shirt and leather vest. With a look of contentment, she strapped on a belt with two heavier knives on it, as well as a whip. She crammed a wool hat on top of her newly shorn head. “Now I feel like meself,” she said, with pleasure.

  Then she stopped, and looked sharply at Gerda. “You noticed,” she said. “‘Bout the men, I mean.”

  Gerda raised her chin. “You’d have to be blind not to. And deaf. They’re just waiting, like crows watching something dying—”

  She caught herself and looked away. Aleksia smiled. This was going well….

  Valeri put her hands on her hips. “Aye, and they think I dunno. That I dunno my rabbit ended up i’ the stew an’ my fawn ended up there, too. They think I just forget things an’ don’t care about ’em no more.” She clenched her jaw. “Bet they’re just waitin’ for me to get tired of bein’ a lady an’ not needin’ you.”

  Gerda nodded wordlessly.

  Oh, very good, girls, Aleksia thought with approval.

  “Well, I might get tired of things sometimes, but that don’t mean I don’t care about ’em.” Valeri’s eyes flashed. “An’ what’s more, I haven’t forgotten about things since I was nine an’ they ate my deer. I see when my things disappear. I just don’t say anything. But I
’ll tell you what, missy. They ain’t getting you.”

  And just like that, Gerda found herself with a rucksack in her hands, shoving things in that Valeri threw at her. Of course, half of those things were weapons, which Valeri then took back, muttering something about a rock being more use to someone like Gerda. But it certainly was not much more than an hour later that they had a tolerable pack put together, with a bedroll tied atop it and plenty of journey-bread in oiled paper inside the top. Gerda looked at it doubtfully, then back up at Valeri. “But how am I to get past the men out there?” she asked.

  Valeri grinned. “You just leave that to me. You put on them things, and be ready when I come for you.”

  Gerda shook her head, but obeyed, pulling on the thick woolen breeches—though she settled her discarded skirt over them, Aleksia presumed for modesty’s sake—the knitted wool shirt and the leather tunic. She put on two pairs of stockings to make the too-large felt boots Valeri had thrown at her fit, then crammed on the battered fur hat and sheepskin shepherd’s coat. And just as she was swinging the pack onto her back, Valeri reappeared.

  She put her finger to her lips, eyes sparkling with mischief, and beckoned. Gerda followed her out into a cavern that the bandits used as their main room. Aleksia flitted her point of view to the reflective surface of an overturned silver goblet.

  There were snoring bodies everywhere.

  Carefully, they picked their way through the sprawled bandits, Valeri leading Gerda deeper into the caverns. She stopped once to get a lantern and lit it with a candle left there for that purpose, then made her way to a hole in the wall only a little taller than a man. That allowed Aleksia to transfer her focus to the glass of the lantern.

  They both plunged into the darkness.

  Valeri’s lamp cast just enough light to show that they were in a narrow tunnel, too rough and too small to have been carved out by the trolls. Likely, this was the original cave that the trolls had enlarged. With the lantern held out in front of them, Aleksia had a fine view of the tunnel. Well, a few feet of the tunnel, anyway.

  The two young women were very quiet. Finally Gerda whispered, “Is it safe to talk?”

  Valeri chortled. “Oh, aye. Them back there won’t be waking up any time soon. I rolled out a keg of brandy-wine for ’em.” Her laugh grew deeper. “Not the first time, neither. See, I’m the one thet brews it. Papa, he got no notion where it comes from, and he’ll be all over ’em to find out which one of ’em does the brewing. They can say for true it ain’t one of ’em, an’ Papa never thinks of me. I been doin’ that since one of the lads we ransomed showed me how. He figured he’d use it t’ get into me breeches, but he got ransomed ‘fore he could try.”

  There was a silence from Gerda that Aleksia could only imagine meant she was stunned by Valeri’s bluntness. Not that Gerda could possibly be ignorant of sex—the town she lived in wasn’t that large that a girl her age hadn’t seen animals and possibly even servants fornicating. But in Gerda’s class, you didn’t talk about it.

  Valeri continued on. “I found this passage when I was half this tall, and I been usin’ it to come an’ go when I wanted t’ creep off somewhere where Papa and the men didn’t know.”

  “But it’s not secret—” Gerda protested. “All those lanterns—”

  “This part ain’t. It goes down t’ the little lake where we get our water from. See?” She raised the lamp and light bounced back at her as they came out into a much larger chamber.

  The steady drip of water from the ceiling echoed around the rocks. This was a sizable room and it was hard to tell just how deep the “lake” was. Valeri skirted along a ledge to the right so narrow that she and Gerda had to put their faces to the rock wall and edge along sideways. At the back of the cavern was another crack, this one very narrow and not at all visible from the other side. Gerda had to take off her pack to squeeze through it.

  “Papa thinks when I disappear it’s ’cause the men have gotten drunk an’ I want some peace,” Valeri continued when they were finally making their way down yet another rough tunnel. “I told him I come back here to think and get some quiet. So he don’t come lookin’ for me. I did just that just enough times that he figures that’s what I always do.”

  “That’s clever!” Gerda exclaimed. Again, Valeri chortled.

  “You think that’s clever, you just wait.” It seemed that Gerda and Aleksia did not have long to wait, either. There was light at the end of this crack, and soon the two young women pushed through a screen of cedars into a tiny pocket valley.

  And there, looking at both of them with great interest, was a tall, shaggy reindeer. When he saw Valeri, he snorted, and shambled over to them.

  “I learnt my lesson,” Valeri said, scratching around the base of the deer’s antlers. “I got me another fawn, an’ I kept this ‘un safe.” She pulled an old, withered apple out of a pocket and offered it to him. While he crunched it up, she blew out the lantern and pulled a sledge and an oiled canvas bag from out of another tangle of bushes. In moments, she had the deer harnessed and hitched to the sledge. The deer snorted happily.

  “Well, get on!” Valeri said impatiently to Gerda, who hastily—if gingerly—settled herself onto the back half of the sledge. Valerie led the deer to a cleft in the rock walls surrounding them, pulled back yet more brush to reveal a stout and very tall gate, and opened it. Then, taking up the reins and jumping onto the front part of the sledge, she snapped the reins briskly on the deer’s back. Without a moment of hesitation, he loped forward, starting the sledge over the snow with a jerk.

  Aleksia moved her viewpoint to a shiny buckle on the deer’s harness.

  They made very good time. Valeri drove standing up, looking like a practiced sailor in a storm as the sledge bumped and skidded over the snow. Gerda clung to the sides of the sledge, white-faced.

  It was at that moment that Aleksia heard Kay’s footsteps outside the throne room. Satisfied that things were going well for now, she dismissed the mirror-vision, and turned to face him.

  He looked miserable.

  He had certainly lost weight, and if the reports her Brownies gave her were true, of how at meals he listlessly pushed things around the plate before finally swallowing a few bites with apparent difficulty, there was no question of why he had lost the weight. His eyes were darkly circled. More reports had reached her that he woke up in the night often, sweating, shaking, out of the grip of nightmares.

  She simply looked at him, schooling her features into a mask of boredom. “Yes?” she said, finally, when the silence had stretched on too long. “You may speak.”

  He coughed. “Great Queen,” he said, hoarsely. “I—uh—”

  “You began with ‘Great Queen’ rather than ‘I’ and that is certainly an improvement,” she said coldly. “I presume you have more to say?”

  He went red, then white. “It—it’s very lonely here—” He faltered. Interesting. All of the arrogance seemed to have leached right out of him!

  “You should have thought of that before you accepted my invitation,” she reminded him.

  “It’s—not—” He faltered again. “It’s Gerda. It’s—I’m worried about her—”

  She tilted her head to the side. “Gerda? What a common name. Who is this wench?”

  She could see him struggle. He wanted to lash out at her because she dismissed Gerda as common and insulted her by implication. But he had finally accepted the fact that she was, and always would be, more powerful than he was and that he was under her control. “Gerda…” he finally managed, “Gerda is a young lady who has…always been my friend. And I—am very fond of her.”

  Aleksia almost laughed, but her control was too good to let that slip. He had almost said that he loved Gerda.

  She shrugged. “I am sure she will find someone else. You have important work to do. You should not be distracted by a mere girl.”

  Once again he went red, then white. “She wouldn’t—I am worried about her!” He persisted. “Without me there,
she might—”

  “Might find someone with an equally shallow mind, who is only interested in settling down and raising fat babies.” She shrugged. “You are destined for greater things as long as you concentrate on your work and not on silly girls.”

  She could see him struggling with all this. On the one hand, she was complimenting him. She clearly valued him, and for the thing he had once thought was the most important.

  On the other hand, somehow over the past several days, Gerda had pushed everything else out of his mind. She knew that look in his eyes now. He was lovesick, obsessed. His nightmares were probably compounded of equal parts of terrible things happening to Gerda, and Gerda finding some other young man.

  My, my. An interesting development.

  “Go,” she said, with a shrug. “If that is all that concerns you, put your fears to rest. The girl will be fine. Her parents will find her a husband, she will have a litter of brats and all will be well in her world. Meanwhile, you will be uncovering the secrets of the Universe. And in the end, it will be you who makes a difference, while she just adds another lot of round-faced children to be good, obedient subjects of your King.”

  She watched him struggling with his desire to retort, watched him conquer himself, and watched him walk away in defeat, shoulders slumped. It was all she could do to keep from jumping up and dancing.

  She did retire to her own rooms for a bit—partly to make sure, should he brace himself up and return to confront her, that she would not be there, and partly because, despite her warm clothing, her hands and feet were cold and numb.

  Her Brownies brought her pea soup and hot bread with butter melting on it. Peasant fare—the cook must have changed again. She sighed with satisfaction. It was a good change; peasant fare was tasty, hearty and very comforting. She felt strongly in the need of comfort.

  Meanwhile, she watched the boy in her small mirror. And it was obvious that her deduction was correct. The boy was lovesick. Thoughts of Gerda clearly intruded on everything he did.