A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  Even in this reflection of the past, Aleksia could see the woman’s potential magic; from this little glimpse, it was not possible to say if The Tradition was putting pressure on her, but there was still plenty of magical energy ambient around her. She was definitely born a Sorceress; Aleksia was absolutely certain of that.

  She and the man were too far away to hear their voices—past-scrying was limited by the physical limitations of whatever reflective surface was being used, so if the reflective object was too far for anyone to have heard voices where it was, well then you didn’t hear speech. It was obvious, however, from the pack on his back and the belt full of pouches and implements, that he was going on a journey; she didn’t want him to leave. But from the look of things, she was not pleading with him to stay, she was desperately asking that he hurry back. She wasn’t weeping, but she wasn’t far from it. She looked up into his face, searching it for something. Reassurance, perhaps.

  He was a very comely man, with ageless, smooth features and bright blue eyes. Aleksia thought shrewdly that the woman was correct to be worried about losing him. She was no beauty, but he was a handsome devil.

  He, in his turn, tilted her face up to his, kissed her, and sent her back into her tower, laughing. Then he strode off toward the village and the scene faded.

  “Hmm,” Aleksia said, thinking. “Well…as you said, this looks promising.”

  “Love and betrayal always are,” Jalmari said cheerfully, and the scenes began again, flickering across the surface of the mirror. Then they steadied.

  This time, the woman was certainly near enough to hear every word—not that this would be difficult, since she was in a towering rage, pacing back and forth across the room. She was cursing and not under her breath, either. Her hair had escaped from the net and billowed out around her shoulders like clouds boiling up before a storm. The vantage point must have been from a mirror on a wall. There was a window just within the field of vision; it was snowing heavily outside and nothing more could be seen. So the man was not back yet, and he had left in the Summer.

  Someone dressed in a heavy cloak entered, shaking off snow. The woman whirled to face her. “Anything?” she demanded. The woman, who beneath the cloak was dressed as a servant, shook her head. The Sorceress’s eyes blazed. “Not a word!” she raged. “Not a word, not a line, nothing! Faithless, worthless—” She broke down, hands clenched at her sides, sobbing aloud as tears poured along her red, streaked cheeks, painful, harsh sobs escaping that sounded as if each one physically hurt her.

  It was a dreadful scene, and even though Aleksia knew it was in the far, far past, it was still uncomfortable to watch. She wanted to find a way to comfort the poor thing, even though, at the same time, she knew that if she had actually been there, she would have been too clumsy and awkward to actually manage to do that. This was not the sort of thing that she was good at. Being cold and aloof, scathing and sarcastic—those she was good at. Not at being comforting.

  The scene shifted again, as Jalmari went hunting for more relevant images. “Hmm. This seems typical,” he said at last, as the mirror steadied. It was a view of the same tower from the outside, somewhere at a distance, but—what a difference! The gardens were dead, there was a new wall about the place and the village looked deserted.

  Ah, but it wasn’t, not quite. There were some furtive movement in the streets there—so there were still people in the village, but they did not want to draw attention to themselves.

  The point of view suddenly changed. To one of…the sky? And a wooden wall of some sort. For a moment, Aleksia was puzzled, until she realized that what she was seeing were the sides of a bucket from the inside, and that Jalmari had moved the viewpoint here, not so that they could see, but so that they could hear.

  “Can she see us?” came a furtive whisper. Female.

  A pause. “I don’t think so. And I don’t see any of her spies.” A note of desperation crept into the voice. “Aili, I have to see you more often!”

  “No!” came the equally desperate reply. “You know what she will do to us if she even guesses you think about me! Look what she did to all the others! If she didn’t outright murder them, she did horrible things to them that made them hate each other! I couldn’t bear it if she did that to us!”

  “Then come away with me!” the boy said. “You know she is only going to get worse! She’s forsworn love, and wants to destroy it—”

  “And that is why we can’t be together!” The girl sobbed.

  “Yes, we can! She can’t be everywhere! She might be a Sorceress, but she’s not the only Sorceress in the world!” He dropped his voice again. “And look what she’s been doing to her servants, Aili. They aren’t even human anymore! They not only don’t love, they don’t even feel! That is what she will do to you, do to me, if she gets a chance. Do you want to end up like that?”

  “I believe that will be enough there,” Jalmari said smoothly. The image dissolved into Jalmari’s face. “Now, just a little more forward in time…let us see what she has built for herself.”

  Now the scene was much more familiar—although the copy of the real Palace of Ever-Winter was not in place. The rest of it, however, was just as Aleksia had seen it in her first view of it. The ice wall. The magical barrier. The dark village outside the walls. And above all, the snow, the ice, the bleak impression that Winter had always been there and always would be there, camped at the gates of the tower like a guardian dog. Only the Sorceress’s dwelling was different; it was still the stone keep. But around it, doing some sort of work, were the animated snow statues….

  The scene again dissolved, darkened and became the void, with the mirror-servant in his usual spot. Jalmari bobbed thoughtfully in place while both of them considered what they had seen. “Well I am glad you urged me to that, Godmother. That answers a great many mysteries.”

  She nodded. “Now we know just where the false Snow Queen came from, and why she is doing what she does. She was betrayed, forswore love—” She grimaced. “You know, in a tale, that might seem a justifiable reason for going to the bad, but I have known any number of kindly folk who have done just that, and then dedicated themselves to God or good works instead. But she—”

  “She declared war on love,” Jalmari said, frowning. “With the results that we both saw. I suspect that the sheer misery she generates may be giving her a great deal of her power. The more misery, the more power. Whether she knows that or not, well, that would be the question, wouldn’t it?”

  Aleksia nosed the mirror, and shifted the Bear’s weight. “That would be typical—although most of the dark magicians get their power through death rather than mere misery.”

  “But that would account for why she has been increasing her territory very slowly,” Jalmari replied. Aleksia nodded.

  “Can you show me something else?” she asked. “I would like to see why she took Veikko—and whether she has taken other young men in the past.”

  “Easily, Godmother,” the being said, and the little hand-mirror misted over again.

  Well, the second question was definitely answered right away…and it made her a little sick to watch it.

  It was always the same. The Sorceress went through any number of young men; they tended not to last very long. It was always the same, she accosted a young man in some way, then bound him to her with a ritual spell. Once he was hers, he was as mindless as one of those snow statues, and she could do with him whatever she pleased. They became white-faced and expressionless, and day by day they faded a little until at last, they simply—stopped. The snow-servants would drag the bodies out and take them somewhere; Jalmari did not bother to find out where. And another question was answered, one that Aleksia had not actually asked out loud.

  For Jalmari showed her the taking of Veikko.

  The question was: what was the spell she used to make certain of these young men? Everything pointed to a peculiar enchantment that only those magicians whose power was linked to ice and snow ever used. It was v
ery effective, but far, far rarer than all of the tales that were told about such things ever indicated. It was difficult. Only the most skilled and powerful of magicians ever mastered it.

  So they watched carefully as she surprised Veikko at his wood-gathering, as she bound him in place so he could not move. And then as she did, indeed, in a rather horrifying ritual, stab an enchanted sliver of ice into his heart.

  Now that she could see it happen, she could analyze the magic. And it didn’t merely look horrifying, it was horrifying. It ate at people, devouring them slowly from within. That was why the young men she took for herself didn’t last very long.

  But the oddest thing was, Aleksia was also certain that the false Snow Queen didn’t know this. As Jalmari replayed what he could to confirm this, they realized something else. She also never saw them die. She had no idea that at some point, each of them would wander out into the snow at night and just walk northwards until they stopped. All she knew was that they disappeared, which was an inconvenience to her, but nothing more. This was unexpected.

  “Is there a mirror in her room of magic-working?” she asked, finally.

  “There should be,” the mirror-servant said. “Why?”

  “Go as far back as you can—you don’t need to show it to me, but tell me if she ever had a mentor or if she has done all of her learning out of books.”

  While Jalmari searched, the Bear dozed with the mirror between her forepaws, and her back to the fire. The Bear form was good for that; dropping into a half-sleep that was as refreshing as a human’s full sleep. A cough from between her paws made her open her eyes again.

  “She inherited the tower and its contents from her grandfather,” Jalmari said flatly. “She never had a mentor.”

  “Then that explains a great deal.”

  The mirror-spirit nodded. “She looks up what she wishes to do in a book, she masters the spell and she looks no further than that. She would not be able to do this if she was not as powerful as she is—and that is the problem. She does not know to research what she wishes to do further. She thinks it is like a cooking book—you look up the dish that you want and you make it, and there are no other considerations other than eating it.”

  Aleksia nodded. “Like the young apprentice who tried to create a servant to do his chores for him but did not look further to discover that it would continue to work until it wore out. She has set in motion things of which she has no idea. And now we must be the ones to set them to rest.”

  The mirror-servant sighed. “Better in your hands than mine, Godmother,” he said. “Is there anything more?”

  “Not now,” she replied, and the mirror went blank.

  She pondered the situation that faced her for a long time, occasionally getting up to grasp another few pieces of wood in her teeth and drop them on the fire. She was faced with a Sorceress powerful enough to have learned her magic solely out of books. She must not have had much of a childhood and adolescence. And perhaps she had been one of those souls who, solitary by nature, preferred being left alone. But one day, long after most women had had their first love and either gotten over him or married him, she encountered a man that captured her. And she must have given him all the passion she had pent up for—perhaps—years.

  Now Aleksia had no idea why the man had not returned. But this Sorceress had been convinced that he had abandoned her, and passionate love turned to passionate anger. At that point, she had forsworn love, went out of her way to destroy lovers and had placed a barrier around her stronghold. Nothing could pass that barrier, and probably she was the only one that could open it.

  In keeping with the state of her emotions, she had locked her land in eternal Winter. Then—

  Well, all Aleksia could think was that she had become incredibly lonely. Why else would she have started to kidnap young men? But she couldn’t chance them abandoning her like her love had, nor did she want them to love her. She wanted them as objects, and that was when she had looked up and found the ice-shard spell. And she went no further than to find how to control them, not what the shard would do to them.

  Veikko, however, might last a bit longer due to being a Warrior and a Mage.

  Aleksia brooded over what she had seen in the mirror. The Imposter, it seemed, used to hate living things; but now she had lived so long that she had even worn out hatred. She seemed weary, more than anything. But the one thing that seemed to keep her going is the will to make others suffer as she did, when her false-true-love abandoned her.

  What an utterly miserable life.

  CHAPTER 13

  ALEKSIA DROPPED THE LAST OF THE WOOD ON THE FIRE AND dozed off in Bear form. By the standards of the Bear, the cave was pleasantly warm at this point. By spending a few moments shoving rocks into a ring around the fire, she was fairly certain that the cave would remain that way as long as she was asleep. There was something to be said for being in this form, besides the obvious. The Bear did not have nightmares. In fact, she rarely remembered the Bear’s dreams at all, and mostly they seemed to feature food. This night was no exception; she dreamed of feasting on honey, berries and fat, rich salmon. By the time she woke, the fire was down to coals and she had a better idea of what she was going to do.

  It was time to get help. She had been fairly sure she was going to need it when she started this—it had all the earmarks of the start of a quest, and The Tradition had very firm paths for quests. Even if you began one alone, even if you would say to your friends, over and over, “You can’t come with me,” at least one and probably more would find a way to follow you or otherwise get involved. She already had the Godmothers looking out for her at a distance, which might satisfy the need for questing partners, except that there were people out here already on the same quest. So she might as well give in to it and round them all up. At least that way they wouldn’t be stumbling over each other and interfering with each other’s plans.

  Now, knowing that the Sorceress in question did not know mirror-magic, made things a little more straightforward. At least Aleksia knew that she and her allies would not be spied on by means of reflective surfaces, so that meant they need only beware of the usual sorts of spying, and perhaps not so many of those. Most of the other ways she knew to spy magically were through agents, either animals or human, and she had seen no evidence of either. The Sorceress’s abilities seemed oddly patchy.

  Still, Aleksia was going to be vigilant. She would, either herself or through one of the others, keep one eye out for birds that never seemed to leave their trail, animals acting oddly and humans in general. Given the situation, any human out here had to be viewed with suspicion.

  But, yes, it was time to gather up the bits and pieces of this incipient quest-party and put together a united front.

  So, the first thing to do was to see where the two Sammi women were. After some hunting in the litter of the cave floor, she found where she had nudged the mirror aside in her sleep and invoked just a tiny trickle of magic to tell her where they were. Since they couldn’t be far from where she was now, it wouldn’t take that much magic.

  The source of reflection was—as might be expected—more ice, this time the frozen surface of a stream, which made a good road. Mentally she applauded their resourcefulness, since she was fairly certain that neither of them had ever spent this much time in the wilderness before. They appeared to be handling themselves well. But the women were not alone. In fact, they were accompanied by Urho the Great Bear, who was hitched to their sledge and pulling it along at a good rate.

  Well, that was a surprise. A pleasant one, but a surprise. She had not expected him to seek them out, even though he had known they were out there. Nor would she have asked him to; he was doing her a great enough favor by bringing supplies to her. I see you are working for your keep, she sent into his mind.

  Huh. I am feeding them, I will have you know! Urho replied with much amusement. Aleksia watched for any reaction from the Sammi but neither woman gave any indication that they “heard” this sile
nt conversation. Good. At the moment she had rather they did not know that Urho could “talk.” Can you see where we are? he asked.

  With care, and one eye out for trouble, Aleksia moved her focus out and out, finally finding a bit of ice at the top of a tree, until she had a good idea where the trio was. Swiftly she moved back to another viewpoint of a bit of brass on Urho’s harness. I found the older men, but not the younger one. The older men are both spellbound, and although I think I know how to free them, I would rather have some help along before I try. If you keep going straight on your current course, I can intercept you before you reach them.

  Then I will do that, Urho replied. Now you must be silent. Too much talk, too much magic, is dangerous. Be careful, Godmother. That warning came just as Aleksia detected a faint stirring that indicated something might have noticed her use of magic. Quickly, she severed the connection between them and went very quiet, magically speaking. She put her head down and thought Bearish thoughts; mostly about the dream she’d had that night, concentrating on how good the dream-food had been, licking the sticky honey from her paws, feeling the sweet juice slipping down her throat.

  The uneasy feeling passed. She waited for some time longer, just to be sure. Now was not the time to ruin everything by being impatient. Instead, she used the time to think, to analyze everything she knew about Traditional tales, to try to passively sense what was going on in the currents of Traditional power.